How Facebook Rapes American Minds and Manipulates Thoughts For The
DNC

Mark
Zuckerberg.

Photographer:
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

How
Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda

Some
of unit’s clients stifle opposition, stoke extremism.

By

Lauren
Etter

,

Vernon
Silver

, and

Sarah
Frier

December
21, 2017, 2:00 AM PST

Under
fire forFacebook
Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder
Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above
partisanship. “We hope to give all people a voice and create a platform
for all ideas,” Zuckerbergwrote
in Septemberafter President Donald Trump
accused Facebook of bias.

Zuckerberg’s
social network is a politically agnostic tool for its more than 2
billion users, he has said. But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander
in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively
works with political parties and leaders including those who use the
platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll
armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.

The
initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and
politics team that’s neutral in that it works with nearly anyone seeking
or securing power. The unit is led from Washington byKatie
Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on
former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since
Facebook hired Harbath three years later, her team has traveled the
globe helping political clients use the company’s powerful digital
tools.

Katie
Harbath.

Photographer:
Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for Glamour

In
some of the world’s biggest democracies—from India and Brazil to Germany
and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.
And once a candidate is elected, the company in some instances goes on
to train government employees or provide technical assistance for live
streams at official state events.

Even
before Facebook wasforced
to explainits role in U.S. election
meddling—portrayed by its executives as a largely passive affair
involving Russian-funded ads—the company’s direct and growing rolecatering
to political campaignsraised concerns inside
the social media giant.

“It’s
not Facebook’s job, in my opinion, to be so close to any election
campaign,” said Elizabeth Linder, who started and ran the Facebook
politics unit’s Europe, Middle East and Africa efforts until 2016.
Linder had originally been excited about the company’s potential to be
“extraordinarily useful for the world’s leaders—but also the global
citizenry.” She said she decided to leave the company in part
because she grew uncomfortable with what she saw as increased emphasis
on electioneering and campaigns.

In
the U.S., the unitembedded
employeesin Trump’s campaign. (Hillary
Clinton’s camp declined a similar offer.) In India, the company helped
develop theonline
presenceof Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. In the
Philippines, it trained thecampaignof
Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging extrajudicial killings, in how to
most effectively use the platform. And in Germany it helped the
anti-immigrantAlternative
for Germany party (AfD)win its first Bundestag
seats, according to campaign staff.

Supporters
of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party dressed in blue tights
attend a campaign rally ahead of European parliamentary
elections on May 23, 2014, in Berlin.

Photographer:
Sean Gallup/Getty Images

By
all accounts, Facebook has been an indispensabletool
of civic engagement, with candidates and elected officials from
mayor to prime minister using the platform to communicate directly with
their constituents, and with grassroots groups like Black Lives Matter
relying on it to organize. The company says it offers the same tools and
services to all candidates and governments regardless of political
affiliation, and even to civil society groups that may have a lesser
voice. Facebook says it provides advice on how best to use its
tools, not strategic advice about what to say.

“We’re
proud to work with the thousands of elected officials around the world
who use Facebook as a way to communicate directly with their
constituents, interact with voters, and hear about the issues important
in their community,” Harbath said in an emailed statement.

She
said the company is investing in artificial intelligence and other ways
to better police hate speech and threats. “We take our
responsibility to prevent abuse of our platform extremely
seriously,” Harbath said. “We know there are ways we can do better,
and are constantly working to improve.”

Power
and social media converge by design at Facebook. The company has long
worked to crush its smaller rival,Twitter,
in a race to be the platform of choice for the world’s so-called
influencers, whether politicians, cricket stars or Kardashians. Their
posts will, in theory, draw followers to Facebook more frequently,
resulting in higher traffic for advertisers and better data about what
attracts users.

Politicians
running for office can be lucrative ad buyers. For those who spend
enough, Facebook offers customized services to help them build effective
campaigns, the same way it wouldUnilever
NVorCoca-Cola
Co.ahead of a product launch.

While
Facebook declined to give the size of its politics unit, one executive
said it can expand to include hundreds during the peak of an election,
drawing in people from the company’s legal, information security and
policy teams.

At
meetings with political campaigns, members of Harbath’s team sit
alongside Facebook advertising sales staff who help monetize the often
viral attention stirred up by elections and politics. They train
politicians and leaders how to set up a campaign page and get it
authenticated with a blue verification check mark, how to best use video
to engage viewers and how to target ads to critical voting blocs.

Rodrigo
Duterte.

Photographer: Mark
R. Cristino/AFP/Getty Images

Once
those candidates are elected, their relationship with Facebook can help
extend the company’s reach into government in meaningful ways, such as
being well positioned to push against regulations.

At
the very least, the optics of directly aiding campaigns or those in
power may create the impression among users that Facebook is taking
sides. Its effort effectively helping the Scottish National Party to
victory in 2015 isrecounted
as a “success story”on Facebook’s corporate
website that lists business case studies, even though those who favor
staying in the U.K. might see it otherwise. In April, Vietnamese
officials bragged that Facebook would build a dedicated channel to
prioritize takedown requests for content that offended authorities. The
company generally routes requests from governments through a separate
channel, and takes the content down if it violates community standards.
If it violates local law, it’ll only be unavailable in the relevant
country.

“They’re
too cozy with power,” saidMark
Crispin Miller, a media and culture professor at New York
University.

That
problem is exacerbated when Facebook’s engine of democracy is deployed
in an undemocratic fashion. A Novemberreport
by Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for
political and human rights, found that a growing number of countries are
“manipulating social media to undermine democracy.” One aspect of that
involves “patriotic trolling,” or the use of government-backed
harassment and propaganda meant to control the narrative, silence
dissidents and consolidate power.

Internally,
Facebook executives are grappling with how to distinguish between what
constitutes trolling harassment and protected political speech.
Zuckerberg has long maintained the company doesn’t want to play censor,
but Facebook has drawn some lines—banning Greece’s Golden Dawn, the
ultranationalist party, for example. The company also often removes themost
extreme content, from white nationalists in the U.S. and from the
Islamic State, as well as content it catches violating its “community
standards” on hate speech and violence. Not all such content gets
caught.

In
retrospect, the nexus of power and data at Facebook seems inevitable. In
2007, Facebook opened its first office in Washington. The presidential
election the following year saw the rise of the world’s first “Facebook
President” in Barack Obama, who with the platform’s help was able to
reach millions of voters in the weeks before the election. The number of
Facebook users surged around the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle
East around 2010 and 2011, demonstrating the broad power of the platform
to influence democracy.

Scottish
National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon at a rally in Glasgow in April
2015.

Photographer:
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

By
the time Facebook named Harbath, the former Giuliani aide, to lead its
global politics and government unit, elections were becoming major
social-media attractions. They now rank alongside the Super Bowl and the
Olympics in terms of events that draw blockbuster ad dollars and boost
engagement.

Facebook
began getting involved in electoral hotspots around the world. They went
to Argentina in 2015, where now-President Mauricio Macri streamed
campaign rallies live on Facebook and, once elected, announced his
entire cabinet on the site, complete with emojis. The same year,
Poland’s nationalist president, Andrzej Duda, became one of the first
world leaders to livestream his inauguration on the social network. Even
as Duda has overseen a crackdown on press freedom in the country,
Facebook’s corporate website says the company was “integral” to his
electoral success and that his page is “one of his office’s main
communication channels.”

Facebook
has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most controversial political
movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it has asked the
U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from political
advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the current
crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the 2016 election, Bloomberg
reported in October. After a Congressional inquiry into Russian election
meddling, Facebook has pledged to be more transparent about ad buyers
and said it’sopen
to regulation.

The
company’s relationship with governments remains complicated. Facebook
has come under fire in the European Union, including for the spread of
Islamic extremism on its network. The company just issued itsannual
transparency reportexplaining that it will only
provide user data to governments if that request is legally sufficient,
and will push back in court if it’s not. Despite Facebook’s desire to
eventually operate in China and Zuckerberg’s flirtation with the
country’s leaders, it’s still unwilling to compromise as much as the
government wants it to in order to enter.

Narendra
Modi.

Photographer:
Rob Stothard/Getty Images

India
is arguably Facebook’s most important market, with the nation recently
edging out the U.S. as the company’s biggest. The number of users there
is growing twice as fast as in the U.S. And that doesn’t even count the
200 million people who use the company’s WhatsApp messaging service in
India, more than anywhere else on the globe.

By
the time of India’s 2014 elections, Facebook had for months been working
with several campaigns. Modi, who belongs to the nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party, relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to recruit
volunteers who in turn spread his message on social media. Since his
election, Modi’s Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost
twice Trump’s count.

Within
weeks of Modi’s election, Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl
Sandberg both visited the nation as it was rolling out a critical free
internet service that the government later curbed. Harbath and her team
have also traveled there, offering a series of workshops and sessions
that have trained more than 6,000 government officials.

As
Modi’s social media reach grew, his followers increasingly turned to
Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns against his
political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one hoax
story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to two separate
mob beatings resulting in seven deaths. The nation has also
become an increasingly dangerous place for opposition parties and
reporters. In the past year, several journalists critical of the ruling
party have been killed. Hindu extremists who back Modi’s party have used
social media to issue death threats against Muslims or critics of
the government.

On
the night of Sept. 5, a Honda motorcycle pulled in front of the
Bengaluru home ofGauri
Lankesh, an outspoken critic of Modi who had been targeted by
patriotic trolls on Facebook and other social media. As the Indian
journalist was unlocking her gate, three bullets struck her in the head
and chest, killing her. No arrests have been made.

Thefinal
editorialLankesh had written for her newspaper
was titled “In the Age of False News.” In it, she lamented how
misinformation and propaganda on social media were poisoning the
political environment.